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Residents rejoice at Boulder Canyon's post-flood re-opening

CDOT says more work to come, but closures will be limited

By Mitchell Byars Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
10/07/2013 06:01:39 PM MDT

Updated:
10/07/2013 06:03:39 PM MDT

After riding his bicycle up from 55th Street, Michael Flemming stops at a washed-out section the Boulder Creek Path about 1½ miles up Boulder Canyon on Monday. Colo. 119 through the canyon has been re-opened to traffic for the first time since the floods last month. (Mark Leffingwell / Daily Camera)

Standing off the side of Boulder Canyon Drive just outside of Nederland on Monday morning, Luellen Ramey and two friends from Arizona took a second to snap a picture overlooking Barker Reservoir. With the sun shining and clear skies, it was hard to blame them.

"I had been wanting to take them up to Nederland and Brainard Lake," said Ramey, a Boulder resident. "Nederland is always a place I try to take guests."

As beautiful a scene as it was, just days ago it was a drive Ramey couldn't make. The historic flooding across Colorado's Front Range forced the closure of Boulder Canyon on Sept. 12, and officials anticipated the road might be off limits to traffic until the end of this month.

But the Colorado Department of Transportation managed to finish enough repairs ahead of schedule that the road to Nederland was re-opened Sunday evening.

"We actually were hiking in (Eben G.) Fine Park and saw them open it up and said, 'Yay! Let's go up to Nederland tomorrow,'" Ramey said.

It wasn't just visitors going up into the canyon. For Prescott Fields, the opening of Boulder Canyon meant he could get back to his home in the 36,000 block of Boulder Canyon Drive for the first time since he evacuated at the start of the flooding last month.

"It was a bit unnerving. There was a lot of uncertainty about when the canyon would be opening," he said. "It was really hard, and the story was always changing."

Fields said after seeing what the roads looked like when he evacuated on Sept. 13, he was impressed with how quickly CDOT was able to get the canyon re-opened.

"I think it's pretty impressive what they were able to get done in a short amount of time," Fields said. "I saw the destruction, and I thought it would be months before it would re-open."

As crews set to work on repairing the road, CDOT posted pictures of the destruction in the days after the flooding on the agency's Flickr account. There are pictures of chunks of roadway gone, guardrails bent over and slides covering entire portions of the roadway. After the flooding, about 20 percent of the road was damaged, with some areas washed away entirely, CDOT officials said.

On Monday, aside from an occasional bent guardrail and some areas with uneven pavement, there was little evidence that a historic flood had swept through the area.

The bike path, however, has not yet been restored, with a large portion of it washed out about 11/2 miles up the canyon.

Amy Ford, a spokeswoman for CDOT, said the road's early opening was simply a result of crews working day and night to fix the roads.

"They just worked really hard," Ford said. "They went 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was an intense schedule."

In many spots where the road had been washed out by flood waters, crews had to re-stabalize the slope, rebuild the base of the road and pour new pavement to top it off. Crews poured 400 tons of asphalt in the canyon and laid down 4,600 tons of large rocks to stabilize slopes.

"That is the kind of work we did up and down the corridor," Ford said.

'Very happy to be home'

Ford also said while she knew it was frustrating for residents, having the canyon closed helped crews finish the work faster in the long run.

"It wasn't always perfect, and we asked people to go around and restricted the times in the canyon and the bus routes, but that truly enabled us to work," Ford said. "It caused a certain degree of pain for neighbors and residents, but it was a much faster recovery for all of that."

Ford said there is still some work left to be done. There are still areas of guardrail that need repair and some further slope stabilization. But Ford said at this point, any work would likely result in minor delays to people driving through the canyon.

"There may be some delays, and we'll have to do things like shut down one lane, but it won't be to the point where we would have to shut down the canyon again," she said.

That is a welcome development for residents like Fields. He was in a hotel courtesy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a few days, but spent most of the month away from his home couch-surfing with friends.

"I was basically a vagabond, so I'm very happy to be home," Fields said.

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